A DUTCH professor has won the Prince of Asturias Social Sciences Award – only the third woman to have been given the prize since it was launched in 1980.

Saskia Sassen, 64, was born in The Hague and is the only woman among the top 10 social scientists in the world, according to the Social Science Citation Index – a list which includes former Prince of Asturias prizewinners Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, Zygmunt Bauman and Alain Touraine.

Professor at the University of Columbia (USA) and visiting lecturer at the London School of Economics, Sassen – who is married to American sociologist Richard Sennett – is an expert in social, economic and political issues relating to globalisation and urban sociology, and her specialist areas of study include immigration, global cities and changes in the liberal State as a result of current transnational conditions.

At the age of 42, she wrote The global city, a book studying cities such as London, New York, Paris and Tokyo.

Although born in The Netherlands to Dutch parents, Sassen has barely spent any time in her native country during the course of her life.

She moved with her parents to Buenos Aires when she was a year old and grew up there before the family relocated to Rome, later to France when Sassen was 17, where she stayed until she was 20, after which she went on to live in the USA where she has been ever since.

Her childhood in Argentina means she speaks perfect Spanish.

Pipping North American economist Paul Romer at the post in the final voting, Sassen has become only the third female winner of the Prince of Asturias Social Sciences Award in 33 years.

The others were US-born philosopher Martha Nussbaum in 2012 and former president of the Republic of Ireland, Mary Robinson, in 2006.